Bandera, Cesáreo. The Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred
in the Genesis of Modern LiteraryFiction. University Park: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. 318 pp.

It is surprising that literary criticism in
the age of theory offers relatively few examples of deep discipleship, for
theory promotes a kind of neo-Aristotelianism in which the original pronouncement
enjoys almost unchallenged authority, so that those who follow upon a Derrida
or a Hillis Miller can, like Aquinas citing Aristotle, hope to establish
the sufficiency of their postulations with the declaration that
philosophicus dixit. True, one's students perhaps too often demonstrate
an unquestioning faith in the utterances of the philosophers of literature,
but the multiplicity of theorists tends to ensure that several voices, rather
than just one, will be heard, sooner or later. Feminist criticism is, I believe,
especially and blessedly free of recourse to absolute authority, even as
its practitioners are joined in an enterprise that far transcends issues
pertaining to a mere method, approach, or construct. Hispanism, deeply averse
to the theoretical, provides still fewer cases of devotion to a single mistress
or master than do the other disciplines. Paul J. Smith's almost doctrinaire
Derridianism is a major and rare model of real discipleship. Another, as
close or closer, is Cesáreo Bandera's adhesion to the teachings of
René Girard, first manifest in his Mímesis conflictiva
of 1975 and now even more fully formulated in The Sacred Game.
The paradox in literary studies, with mentoring
systemic to them, is that they, like parenting, encourage both subservience
and independence. Devoted discipleship intensifies the contradiction between
dedication to doctrine and the need for the mature mind to be able to function
on its own terms. This difficult relationship resembles that Renaissance
creative procedure known as imitatio, in which a new work is unimaginable
apart from some authoritative precedent but in which the new work struggles
to establish its own identity

107

108

ROBERT TER HORST

Cervantes

variously and contradictorily, often in stages of submission to precedent,
rivalry with it, and strivings to surpass it. With its prologue by René
Girard, Mímesis conflictiva is in large part an act of homage
to the master, his teachings applied to a couple of the major monuments of
Golden-Age Hispanic literature, a move adumbrated by Girard himself with
his analysis of La novela del curioso impertinente in Mensonge
romantique et vérité romanesque as far back as 1961. The
Sacred Game, appearing almost twenty years after Mímesis
conflictiva, is the study in which the student would surpass the teacher.
To attempt to do so is no small undertaking, for Girard himself does battle,
in books like Violence and the Sacred, with the greatest figures in
Western thought and culture, so as to propose and impose his theory of the
sacrificial function of religion, above all Christianity, in the origin and
evolution of human society, one that he presents as more satisfactory than
Darwinian evolution. It would be hard to be more inclusive than Girard when
he advances a single accounting for all culture and all meaning. However,
Girard takes a rather dim view of the modern secular mind, precisely because
of its aversion (Bandera describes the response as an allergic one) to the
sacred: The failure of modern man to grasp the nature of religion has
served to perpetuate its effects. Our lack of belief serves the same function
in our society that religion serves in societies more directly exposed to
essential violence. We persist in disregarding the power of violence in human
societies; that is why we are reluctant to admit that violence and the sacred
are one and the same thing (262).
In their insistence on the inescapability of
religion, these remarks appear to me to be the embryonic idea of The Sacred
Game, which undertakes universally to delimit human cultural response
by the brackets provided in the all-inclusive interplay, or dialectic, between
the so-called sacred and the so-called profane, the binary opposition generative
of Bandera's book. Yet in a departure at least of emphasis from the master,
Bandera discerns a positive role for some of the most celebrated literary
artifacts of our present secular, individualistic society, or at least a
less negative role. For it would seem that the greatest philosophers and
artists have been caught by Girard and Bandera in a vast scheme to conceal
the hideous truth that religion is indissolubly bonded to violence and violence
to religion, and that this unholy alliance is what both causes and sustains
society and culture, no matter how brilliantly and eloquently the poets and
philosophers strive to turn us away from the horror of an unvarying fundamental
perception. In a marvelous modern extension of Covarrubias's Fingen los
poetas, Bandera assigns the lowest rank in his hierarchy to fictionalizers
(he deploys the category of poets and poetry in the Germanic sense of
Dichtung and indeed his tract, with apologies to Goethe, might well
be called Dichtung und Wahrheit), but at the same time the critic
confers upon such as Cervantes and Calderón a high value because,
in an entropic process that he labels as thinning down, they
are less successful than their predecessors at hiding the sacrificial truth.
This is not unstinting praise.
In The Sacred Game itself there is much
to praise. It is an impressive enterprise related to Hispanism and the study
of Calderón and Cervantes only in a minor fashion. It appears to progress
from monument to monument, with extensive

15.2 (1995)

Review

109

analyses of Plato, Aristotle, Vergil, Renaissance epic as a failure, Cervantes,
Calderón, and a particularly compelling deconstruction of hapless
Karl Marx. It is simply, clearly, and urgently written; and one feels compelled
to admire the range of Bandera's passion. Few Hispanists could or would venture
to address a historical succession of the greatest works in the Western canon
with or without the assistance of René Girard. Most decidedly, The
Sacred Game is a work with a thesis and I think it best to divulge that
thesis in Bandera's own words:

This historical progression from the breakup of the sacrificial idolatrous
system toward a deepening sense of individual responsibility and therefore,
freedom, in the face of the crucified describes the trajectory that, in a
certain sense, is traveled in reverse by the existential intuition of the
great poets, both dramatic and narrative, who would become the classics of
modern literature. As we have seen in Cervantes and Calderón, they
begin with the plight of the individual who, in one way or the other, shows
herself unable to sustain the burden of her individual, non-transferable,
responsibility and freedom, and will end up with the vision of a primitive
and violent system of intersubjective relationships in which the individual
loses her freedom completely and / or innocent victims are sacrificed to
keep the system in place. What I have been trying to say is that this poetic
intuition, which is probably the most decisive in the genesis of modern
literature, would not have been possible without that historical progression
in the Christian consciousness and experience of the system-breaking event
of the Crucifixion (254).

I am abundantly and painfully aware that Bandera's
exegesis draws great strength from the conviction that the ontological existence
of the sacred is absolute, so that his argument presents itself as irrefutable.
One can only position oneself with respect to the premise, not deny it, even
though no evidence whatsoever is adduced in support of the basic contention.
That for Bandera is self-confirming and self-evident. This seems to me to
be a highly unfortunate mode of reasoning, but rather than engage in sterile
debate with it, I will offer as my major criticism of The Sacred Game
its extreme dogmatism, especially disheartening because it aims to close
out the discussion. In 1869, in his inaugural address as the thirty-four-year-old
president of Harvard, Charles William Eliot, a professor of chemistry, declared
that [p]hilosophical subjects should never be taught with
authority. . . . The notion that education consists in the
authoritative inculcation of what the teacher deems true may be logical and
appropriate in a convent, or a seminary for priests, but it is intolerable
in universities. In 1882, when he was asked to endorse an investigation
that would reveal the harmony between true Christianity and true
Science, Eliot objected, declaring that he did not hold the
view that impartial investigation is possible in any branch of knowledge
if the inquiry is made with a view to demonstrate a proposition already assumed
to be true (I quote from Bruce Kuklick's The Rise of American
Philosophy, 134). Eliot's principles not only launched over a century
of unprecedentedly fruitful study both at Harvard and in the nation's centers
of higher education, but also are as useful and as liberating in 1995 as
they were in 1869. Bandera's universalist method of absolute and unqualified
asseveration, his

110

ROBERT TER HORST

Cervantes

alls, onlys, and everys are profoundly
constrictive and retrograde, for they substitute doctrine for dialogue.
Bandera's sequence of great authors who react
variously to the awful hidden truth seems to suggest that his method is a
zeitgeistlich, Spenglerian one and such an approach appears to be
most pertinent in his treatment of the devotio moderna and of Karl
Marx. However, just as Marx founds his construct of historical process on
an extremely narrow span of time, the years between 1789 and 1848, so Bandera
bases his chain of responses on a sole event, the sacro-violent
Ereignis that finds its cure in the Christusereignis. Since
discussion inevitably returns to the sacro-violent-cum-Christian nexus, the
real result is ahistorical and anti-historical monotony, a uniformity proudly
admitted by Bandera in the Marxian context: The fact of the matter
is that the fundamental structure of the sacred, the sacrificial structure,
has remained basically unchanged since time immemorial across all kinds of
forms of material production and material intercourse. That sacrificial structure
has operated at all levels of hunting, nomadic, or agricultural societies,
for example, in rural or urban communities (278). Here one notices
how in Bandera's logic, every premise in the syllogism or the sorites is
distributed, i.e., universal. More alarmingly, the whole panorama
of human change is limited to a single perspective. A more anti-historical
point of view would be difficult to imagine. Just following Bandera's words
on p. 279, Marcel Gauchet is cited to the effect that what Gauchet calls
the Neolithic revolution took place without producing any systemic
religious or cultural alterations. I take the Neolithic revolution
to be that shift in acquiring food from hunting and gathering to subsistence
farming and stock-breeding which would have radically changed the function
and status of women. I do not exactly know what Gauchet means by
systématiquement, but for woman to have lost considerable
worth and freedom as her role moves from that of forager to that of breeder
of men strikes me as being a profound cultural innovation. The recoverability
of prehistoric cultures is itself a vexed question, but one seriously doubts
whether any human institution is immune to change, exempt from time.
Another methodological issue raised by The
Sacred Game is the place of the text in critical analyses of it. Before
the New Criticism, literary texts were more or less subject to a rather limited
notion of history. Keniston could read, and usefully read, the poetry of
Garcilaso as a kind of emotional biography, éducation
sentimentale. By putting the text first, the New Criticism effected one
of those revolutionary changes so obvious as now to seem no change at all.
Especially with poetry, the yield from the New Critical shift in emphasis
was sensational. But the sometimes excessive proximity of interpreter to
interpreted revealed a dangerous tendency to myopia. Advening shortly after
the apparent triumph of the New Criticism, theory again introduced distance
into perspectives on the verbal artifact, and with distance a new vision
and control, for the production of literary meaning came to be understood
as systemic and so quite revealingly akin to other modes for generating
significance. In structuralism and postructuralism the temptation has been
to subordinate literature to non-literary systems, whether Saussurean or
Lacanian, and so return to the situation that

15.2 (1995)

Review

111

obtained before the New Criticism. Nonetheless, the finest criticism has
saved the perhaps non-existent text by securing its primacy according
to a loose set of rules of literary evidence of which the principal tenet
is that the work itself is the best evidence of itself. But such an assumption
is far from excluding other circumstances that throw light on the main issue,
so that all relevant circumstantial evidence is both welcome and admissible.
It is difficult, but rewarding, to balance the claims of the literary work
upon which the critic concentrates against those of other pertinent systems.
Yet Cesáreo Bandera is, in The Sacred
Game, detained by no such difficulty. He subordinates literature to the
sacred at the lowest degree of his rigid hierarchy: The experience
of the sacred precedes and grounds all ideology as well as all theology and
poetry (15). The anthropological and historical context from
which the Cross derives its meaning and upon which it impacts with devastating
force is prior to and far more universal than philosophy. The Cross owes
absolutely nothing to philosophy; nor, for the same reason, does it owe anything
at all to Western culture, to the language of the West, whereas
Western culture could not exist without it. In the final analysis, it is
not the Cross that must account for itself before the tribunal of philosophy,
but the other way around (243). My heart goes out to the philosophers
here; but it does so with the full realization that, even though by far a
lesser phenomenon, literature will not escape the inquisitor's summons (indeed,
the role of literature in The Sacred Game is that of the accused)
and be found even more wanting, guiltier still, than its more significant
companions in crime.
It accordingly does not require a very vivid
imagination, if Bandera's opinion of literature is low, to conceive how little
of his esteem is enjoyed by those implicit apologists of it, the literary
critics. These are, in fact, by and large ignored, much as Girard, in A
Theater of Envy, has dismissed what he calls the Shakespeare
Establishment. I will leave it to the philosophers and theologians
to fend for themselves; but in the case of the Aeneid, for example,
the omissions are amazing. No critical opinion dating after the 1960s (except
for Mario de Cesare's of 1974) is cited, not even that of so eminent a
commentator as Michael Putnam, whose Aeneid VII and The
Aeneid is most pertinent though, of course, at variance with the
Bandera thesis. The section on the alleged failure of Renaissance epic omits
so much as to mention the Araucana of Ercilla or any analysis of Hispanic
heroic poems save Frank Pierce's. In the recapitulations of Mímesis
conflictiva that thinly constitute the sections on Don Quixote
and Calderón, not one critic of Cervantes is cited, and only one
commentator on Calderón, Edward Wilson. These discussions are deplorably
weak and deficient. Girard's theory of mimetic desire simply cannot be made
to account for the whole literary output of Cervantes, nor can a brief analysis
of two or three of Calderón's tragedies based on Girard's
view of the connection between violence and the sacred even begin to represent
Calderón's total dramatic production of over two-hundred plays.The Sacred Game is reductive. Irrespective
of time, place, circumstance, and all antecedent analysis, each work is measured
by a single and absolute standard of value, its writer's proximity to or
distance from the thought of René

112

ROBERT TER HORST

Cervantes

Girard: . . . Marx could not have fully known how closely
the logic of the market economy he was so brilliantly analyzing reflected
the logic of what actually happens in the mist-enveloped regions of
the religious world (270). The only thing that Popper lacks
is an articulate theory of the sacred capable of explaining the social mechanism
that keeps idolatry and superstition in place (259). Or, with reference
to the violence with which the Aeneid concludes: The sacrificial
institution is the only cultural frame of reference in which death, violence
and suffering can find meaning for any given society. It is the only mechanism
that can transform such a terrifying matter into social forms of human
existence (132). This explains how Turnus's death founds
Rome. Or the idea that a historical experience of the sacred could
be instrumental in the revelation of a victim who, in spite of being a scandal
to everybody, despised and accused by the crowd, is without guilt, could
only appear frightening to Plato. Within the Platonic system it is simply
inconceivable that God could be the breaker of collective sacrificial unanimity,
that God could be on the side of a victim unanimously found guilty and
despicable. That is, of course, the radical, the immense, difference that
separates Plato from the Judeo-Christian revelation (63). Thus Bandera's
investigations into Plato, Aristotle, Vergil, Cervantes, Calderón
and Marx amount to a series of invidious comparisons in which each artist
or thinker fails, to a lesser or greater degree, to measure up to René
Girard.
That Girard has made a significant contribution
to critical thought is, I believe, undeniable. His more valuable insight
is the wonderfully obvious one of mimetic desire, which, because of its broad
applicability, has in a sense ceased to be the property of its originator.
The critic who has most successfully appropriated triangular desire is Eve
Sedgwick, who in her Between Men has transformed Girard's rigid model:
. . . it would perhaps be easiest to describe this book
. . . as a recanting of, and a refocusing on, René Girard's
triangular schematization of the existing European canon in Deceit, Desire,
and the Novel (17). The marvel in this appropriation is its shift
from the dogmatic to the dialectic: . . . I mean to situate
this book in a dialectically usable, rather than an authoritative, relation
to the rapidly developing discourse of feminist theory (17). Perhaps
the greatest failure in both Girard and Bandera is that they both arrogantly
refuse dialogue. Consequently, the most signal void in The Sacred Game
is the absence from it of gender, precisely the revolutionary contribution
of Sedgwick as she modulates from the autocratic to democratic exchange.
Bandera is not unaware of this fatal omission. He does strange and unfortunate
things with pronouns, as is evident in the citation from page 254, where,
seeking equilibrium between female and male, he deploys the grammatically
feminine her. Even so, that possessive adjective is, in the context
of El médico de su honra, dramatically and tellingly misplaced.
For in the play the person who is unequal to the challenge of freedom is
male, Gutierre, and not the in the main powerless Mencía. The seemingly
liberal adjective consequently further victimizes the victim. Indeed, the
introduction of the female into the Giraldian schema of mimetic desire
considerably undermines the postulate of randomness in the fusion of violence
with the sacred, because there the victim, far from being the product of
indifferent choice, tends horribly and overwhelmingly to be female, a noun
that

15.2 (1995)

Review

113

in the three major Romance languages is also feminine. The reader of The
Sacred Game should entertain no illusions. This is a masculinist text
which, despite a few occasional and maladroit adjustments, unabashedly subsumes
the female under the male and repeatedly universalizes human beings under
the rubric of man. No female author or thinker is even considered
in The Sacred Game, not even Jane Harrison. Moreover, in the ultimate
object of Bandera's disdainful address, the modern poet, this
person is exclusively of the male gender: . . . it concerned
him precisely in his role as poet . . . like a quicksand
on which he stood . . . the human truth he discovered
. . . this is why his discovery tended to make him
humble . . . about his own poetic task (301; all emphases
mine).
Bandera, in his first page and a half, alludes
to the reaction of a distinguished Spanish literary critic to his book on
the Poema de mío Cid as an undifferentiated allergic one:
Esta cosa me da alergia (1). As an asthmatic atheist, I also
wish to attest to my own allergic response. But it is not, I hope,
undifferentiated. I believe that I have identified the allergens active in
The Sacred Game, its bigotry, its dogmatism, its sexism, its disdain,
its refusal of dialogue. Biological asthma is, alas, the body's bronchial
misreading of threats like pollen, dust, and spores from the outside. My
spiritual asthma in response to Cesáreo Bandera's The Sacred Game
is, I fear, a dismayingly clear reading of its massively misguided menace.
Sedgwick redeemed mimetic desire by introducing the female into the void
between men and thus generalizing the concept, for every human being can
place herself or himself at some point in the opposition of male to female.
But Bandera's confrontation of the sacred with the profane is a wasteland,
a literal no man's land. And as for his premise that the sacrificial construct
is all-embracing, nego maiorem, maiorem nego.